As the lights go down at Mission District club Balançoire, smoke machines fill the stage with a fog that is quickly dotted with swirling pinpoints of red and green light. The music rises, and the audience looks up: Dangling from the suspended hoop that gives the club its name is drag performer Cruzin d’Loo, clad in a purple gown and towering blond wig. Like a gender-bending piñata, she’s slowly lowered onto the stage.

“Welcome to the ‘Queens of 2015,’” d’Loo says to the audience, many soaked from the stormy pre-El Niño night. “And welcome to Balançoire, the only club in San Francisco where you can see a fat bitch like me come down on a hula hoop.”

D’Loo sets the perfect tone for the performances to come. The “Queens of 2015,” a celebration of the Bay Area’s newest drag talent organized by performer Terri T. Wafflez (we’ve used a sanitized version of her anatomically themed stage name), is all about the humor.

Backstage in the club’s dressing room earlier in the night, the smell of hairspray fills the air as the queens make up and tuck for the show. The 14 performers featured this evening all made their Bay Area drag debuts this year. Some have done drag in other cities, but many took their first steps in heels in 2015. Like Balançoire’s regular Thursday night revue, “Ain’t Your Mama’s Drag Show” (hosted by d’Loo), this new generation of talent ain’t your mama’s queens. The glitter-bearded Sara Converted, 22, got her start in January and credits the late performer Cookie Dough with helping her find a place onstage.

“The name Sara Converted is a pun,” she says, “I found out I’m HIV-positive this year, and to be seroconverted is to go from HIV-negative to positive. When I learned my status, I knew I wanted to do drag, and it’s been a really important part of this year for me.”

Thriving community

Mama Celeste Queen, also 22, has been doing drag for three years and started a campus drag scene while in college at Sarah Lawrence in New York. She moved to San Francisco in June and is happy to see that for all the displacement of the arts in the city, the drag world is alive and well.

“I came out tonight even though I’ve got this awful cold and my voice has dropped an octave,” she says, adjusting the shoulders on her rose-printed power-suit blazer. “It’s funny, because I always was really attracted by women like Bea Arthur who had deep voices when I was a kid.”

Balançoire owner Rick Einselen is happy the club has been able to provide a place for new talent to experiment and find their voices, even if they’re lip-syncing.

“Since we opened, this community has really adopted us as a venue to try new things,” he says. “We’re doing something different here. The vibe of the queens in the clubs in the Castro is something else entirely. Because we’re a Mission District club, these performers get more arty, they get crazy. At our Sunday brunches we have both very old-school queens and these girls that just shock people with death drops,” which is when a queen does a dramatic sudden fall into the splits.

Shattered glass

Among the performance’s highlights are Wafflez’s profanity-laden remix of the standard “Blue Moon,” complete with illuminated space helmet and fellow queens dropping fake snow on her from the balconies above. The Divine Miss Bovine’s bingo-lady-meets-butterfly ensemble lends itself perfectly to her lip-sync of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.” Every time Riperton hits one of the song’s signature high notes, Bovine shatters a piece of prop glass, then gives the audience a befuddled grimace over her cat’s-eye glasses. The audience knows to expect something messy when pink-haired Pepto Dismal first lays down a sheet of cellophane over the stage, and their expectations are fulfilled.

As the queens take the stage together for the finale, Silly String is projected in every direction.

“You know you’re an old queen when you’re surprised no one is performing to Ethel Merman,” d’Loo quips. She closes the show as she began: by being raised back up on the club’s balançoire to the tune of Barbra Streisand’s “Goodnight,” Silly String dangling from her stilettos.

After the show, the performers gather by the bar to meet their public. They’re looking forward to more gigs and refining their drag further in 2016.

“They didn’t look like new queens out there,” Wafflez says with pride. “They looked like pros.”

After the crowd disperses, Wafflez is left alone for cleanup. As DJ Tweaka Turner spins a remix of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Wafflez grabs a broom. Twirling gleefully in her glow-stick-fringed frock, she sweeps up the Silly String, her lipstick-slashed mouth unable to stop itself from lip-syncing one last song.